Study Predicts a Bleak Future for Many Birds

A just-published analysis of some 200 separate studies of the impact of climate change on birds is grim. There are about 10,000 bird species globally and most of them live on land. Based on the middle range of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ’s projection of warming—3.5 degrees Celsius or 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100— 534 to 800 tropical land bird species could become extinct, out of a total of 7,565 species. Worldwide, of all of the 8,500 or so land bird species, as many as 600 to 900 could disappear. And for each degree of climate warming above that, the experts say, another 100 to 500 birds might go extinct. “It’s yet another wake-up call,” said Cagan H. Sekercioglu, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Utah and one of the authors of the study, which was published online in Biological Conservation . “Birds are sentinels of what...